Three weeks ago I blogged about an encrypted telegram that was sent from New York to Tel Aviv in 1948. This cryptogram has now been solved.

On June 5, 1948, an encrypted telegram was sent from New York via London to Tel Aviv. I covered this telegram, which was provided to me by blog reader Dr. Karsten Hansky, in a blog article in April. The telegram is noted on two forms. Here they are:

The recipient of the telegram was the government of Israel. Considering that the state of Israel was proclaimed in Tel Aviv, a few weeks before the message was sent, this telegram was written in an interesting time to an interesting place.

Peterson’s International Code

I my blog post from April I wrote: “This telegram was probably encrypted with a codebook. The easiest (and maybe even the only) way to decipher it is to find the codebook that was used.” This guess turned out to be right.

Karsten Hansky published a post about the telegram in a Yahoo expert group dealing with telegraphic codes. He received an answer from John McVey, a design professor and codebook expert from Massachusetts. John had recognized the codebook. It was the Peterson’s International Code (3rd edition, 1929). The following scan shows a page of it (taken from John’s website):

John provided the following word-by-word decryption:

Telegram #1
line 1
147 etc [heading information; can’t make out last word/cipher on line
LFRZY? not in code]